


in between the shadow and the soul

by thatsveryambitiousofyou



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCeased (DC Comics)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:00:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25573984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsveryambitiousofyou/pseuds/thatsveryambitiousofyou
Summary: With thirty years of history separating them, Jason learns to forgive his family.Or Jason moves forward thirty years into the future and meets an elderly Bruce Wayne.
Relationships: Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne
Comments: 15
Kudos: 180





	in between the shadow and the soul

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet 17

_ I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz, _

_ or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off. _

* * *

Bruce Wayne hears the crack of iron against bone and he thinks of black hair and blue eyes staring back at him, calling out his name, reaching out to him in the cold, heavy darkness. 

Bruce reaches and reaches and reaches and he watches the darkness envelope Jason’s face and his neck and his body. Bruce stretches his arm longer and he feels his skin begin to rip at the seams, and he thinks for a moment that this will tear him clean in two. 

“Bruce,” Jason says, and it comes quiet, tender, and he knows it doesn’t belong here where the darkness feels infinite. He tries to grab Jason’s hand and feels his fingertips brush against his before the darkness swallows him whole.

“Jason!” Bruce screams. “Jason! No, no, no. Jason!” Bruce claws at the darkness, claws at his skin and flesh and bone, trying to fight it, to beat it. 

“ _ Give him back _ ,” Bruce says again, strangled, and the darkness dissipates like water thrown into fire. 

“Bruce,” Jason says behind him, and his voice is soft and gentle and  _ alive _ , and Bruce turns around to see him - Jason, his Jason - staring back at him, all of ten years old, without the burden of Robin on his shoulders. 

Bruce just stares at him, and Jason grins, and Bruce wants to keep it in his memory forever. 

“Are you okay?” Jason cocks his head, smiling at him, but the worried furrow on his brow gives him away, ( _ it’s always been Jason’s tell _ ) and, despite himself, Bruce smiles. 

Bruce takes a step towards him, and hugs Jason close to his chest. He feels Jason wrap his arms around his neck and bury his face on his shoulder, and Bruce thinks he doesn’t deserve this, doesn’t deserve to hold Jason whole and unscathed, but he hugs him anyway, and Bruce knows that he is selfish. 

Bruce has never been superstitious, but he knows that the world will not let him go with this one memory without asking for something in return. ( _ Bruce agrees. Bruce accepts. If for this one moment, Bruce will gladly accept the burden of Atlas).  _

“No,” Bruce answers Jason, finally.

He hears Jason chuckle in his ear, but there’s no humour in it. “I know, Dad,” Jason answers him back, and Bruce lets out a sound like it’s hurting him. “I know.” 

Bruce hugs him so tight he thinks Jason will break, but all Jason does is hold him back just as tight, and Bruce  _ knows  _ he doesn’t deserve this either. 

* * *

Bruce wakes up, and he thinks,  _ this is something I don’t deserve too. _

* * *

Later, Bruce comes home with three gunshots in his chest, knives still lodged in his arm and in his thigh, and a body that feels like it’s about to collapse, and Bruce thinks,  _ if this is the cost, I will gladly pay.  _

* * *

Jason comes back - broken and not entirely himself, but alive and breathing and  _ Jason.  _

When Bruce finds out, he goes to the cave and stares at the monument he’s built for his son, and he mourns him again and again and again until he thinks his heart is going burst right against his chest and the world will swallow him whole and spit him right back up empty and hollow.

Bruce knows he doesn’t deserve it, but he takes and he takes and he takes, and all he wants to do is keep him close to him where the darkness can’t take him. 

He prints the grainy footage he has of Red Hood, and puts a copy in his wallet and another in his armor, underneath the kevlar on top of his heart, right next to a photo of him and Jason when he was Robin. 

( _ And a photo of him and Dick, and Dick and Tim, and Alfred and the boys, and all the things he has but never deserved. _ ) 

Red Hood doesn’t face him yet, but he says Bruce’s name in that way of his, with a Gotham accent as pure as water, if only with the same anger and bitterness Jason used when he talked to the worst of them. Even then, the familiarity of it all shakes his bones and rattles his lungs and all he can think is  _ thank you, thank you, thank you _ . 

Bruce thinks he doesn’t deserve that too, but he is a selfish man, so he accepts the gift and doesn’t think about its consequences. He knows they will all be worth it. 

* * *

_ “It's a hell of my own making, Alfred.” _

_ “Sir, this is not your doing. You loved  _ _ him. He knows that.” _

_ A pause. _

_ “It should  _ _ be enough.” _

_ “It's not.” _

\---

“ _ I'm talking about  _ _ him. Just him! _ ” Jason shouts, pointing at a gun at Bruce’s face with one hand, and the Joker in a chokehold on the other. He sees the tremble in Jason’s hand, the way his voice breaks in the middle of his sentence, and Bruce blinks under his cowl, and for one brief moment, he sees Jason the first time he met him - when Jason was half the weight he was supposed to be, the way he looked at Bruce when he was acting tough but felt as if all the fears of the world had suddenly fallen into his arms. 

“ _ And doing i _ _ t because, _ ” Jason’s voice falters, and it’s pained and quiet and angry all at the same time, and Bruce wants to tug at him from the darkness. “ _ Because he took me away from you. _ ” 

“ _ I can’t. I’m sorry, _ ” Bruce says. Bruce doesn’t say that he tried - that after his death, he found Joker and had pinned him against the wall, a blade pressed against his throat so tightly that he drew blood. Five seconds more and Joker would have been nothing but yesterday’s nightmare.

He doesn’t say that before he could push down further, he heard Jason’s voice on his first patrol, shouting, “ _ B! That’s too much, that’s enough! _ ” 

He doesn’t say that one moment he was looking into the endless, black eyes of Joker and the next he was staring at Jason’s blue, and that it shook him so terribly at his core that he dropped the blade, and Joker had kicked him so hard he hit his head and almost died from the concussion.

He doesn’t say,  _ I wish I could. I wish I did.  _

* * *

Between one moment and the next, he throws a batarang towards Jason’s gun, and saves all three of them. 

They fight and the bomb detonates, and, as the building collapses, Jason leaves. 

Bruce mourns. 

* * *

In the middle of a gun fight with Nightwing, Red Robin and Robin by his side, Red Hood shows up, and it turns the tide of the fight. Bruce notices the way he aims for their thighs and their feet, incapacitating them but not killing them, and a hope in his chest burns bright. 

When the last of them is on the floor bloody, Jason takes a moment to fix his armour and put the guns in their holsters. “Thanks, little wing,” Dick says, strained but the fondness in his voice is palpable, and Bruce wonders how it got there. 

“We could have won it without you, Todd,” Damian scoffs at Jason, but the edge in his voice that he reserved for most people has disappeared. 

“Wouldn’t have doubted that for a second, Robin,” Jason answers him, opening his jacket to grab a grapple gun underneath.

The sight of it stops Bruce in his tracks. 

A bat -  _ their symbol  _ \- painted over his chest in red against black. 

It’s an acceptance, Bruce realizes, and the hope burns even brighter than he would ever let himself admit. 

“Keep your noses dry,” Jason says, with something like a smirk in his voice, feigning a two-finger salute before he shoots the grapple gun, jumps and disappears.

* * *

Jason comes back eventually - a reluctant part of the family, but family all the same, and this makes Bruce ache right down to the soles of his feet and the hair in his head. 

It’s difficult to convince himself that Jason is real, but sometimes he hears him laugh from the den and it knocks the wind right out of him and he has to take a few seconds to compose himself before he collapses. 

He wants to memorize it, wants to burn it into his flesh the way a bullet does, the way the heat doesn’t leave his skin and the way it scars and stays with him each day. 

He finds himself staring at Jason when he happens to be around the Batcave, when Dick and Damian are training and Tim is already upstairs working on something or the other. Jason is cleaning his guns - sure and precise - and it reminds him of a Jason a few years back that smiled at him as he helped Alfred clean the fine china. 

Bruce just looks, his chin resting lazily on his knuckles. He doesn’t even realize it. 

He looks at Jason, looks at the familiar way his hair grows into curls the longer they get, the freckles lining his nose. His jaw and cheekbones are sharp, no longer harbouring the baby fat that used to line his face. Bruce notices a small scar right above his brow, one he knows wasn’t there a week ago. In another lifetime, Bruce thinks, he would know where the scar is from and how it got there, in a world where he wasn’t so terrified of loving his sons in a way they understood. 

Bruce realizes that Jason looks like a Wayne - looks like his own right down to the curve of his ear. 

(Bruce doesn’t listen to the voice in his head that’s saying:  _ because he is yours. He is yours just as much as all of them are. He is yours just as much as you are your own. _ )

Jason looks up at him staring and rolls his eyes. An anger - subtle, but present - grazes his features, and Bruce realizes he’s done the wrong thing. 

( _ Doesn’t he always? _ ) 

“I get it. No guns -  _ blah blah _ . I’ll just fucking go,” Jason says, quickly putting the guns in their holsters on his waist, thighs and back. 

“No, Jay,” Bruce manages to say before he has a chance to think. “It’s fine. I don’t mind.  _ Stay. _ ” 

Jason slows down, but he continues to shove gun after gun where they’re supposed to be. 

“Little Wing,” Dick shouts from behind them, trying to stop him from going.

“S’okay, big bird,” Jason says, slinging his bag over his shoulder and walking towards his motorcycle. “Gotta go anyway. Wouldn’t wanna desecrate the almighty Batcave with my presence.” 

The hurt and anger beneath the words slaps Bruce across the face. 

Bruce wants to say,  _ No, Jay, I want you here. I want you to stay here and be safe and never leave. I’m sorry I let you the first time. Don’t make me watch you go again.  _

He wants to say,  _ Come back home.  _

He wants to say,  _ Jason. Please. I’m sorry I couldn’t be the person you needed me to be.  _

He wants to say,  _ I love you. I’ll be better.  _

Instead, he says nothing, and Jason leaves, the roar of his bike ringing in Bruce’s ears. 

* * *

Bruce is starting to think that all his stories will end with Jason leaving. 

  
  



End file.
